The Insurance Corporate Venturing Pulse

When you introduce two good friends that you know from two completely different walks of life, there is that pregnant pause in which both seek to find a common connection and language to build a relationship. To the introducer, it seems perverse that there would be a delay, you know both people intimately and you have thought long and hard before introducing them. So I liken the insurtech corporate venturing world today.

Inherently it makes sense that entrepreneurial tech businesses have the capability to transform venerable insurance businesses. In most cases there are shared values and a receptiveness to make a relationship work. Yet there is an uncertainty born of speaking different “languages” and the reality that operates in their respective sectors (resisting and embracing change, regulation, corporate bureaucracy and inertia).

Having assisted a number of businesses on both sides of the table, here is my current take:

The quantum of insurance tech money will double in the next 24 months. There will be a greater concentration of capital in the hands of a smaller number of powerful brands (VCs, CVCs and UHNWs), who are able to raise capital faster.

You will rarely hear about the failed insurtech investments but be certain 80% of the so-called strategic investments will never be strategic, in that those technologies are successfully adopted into the insurance corporate venturing unit’s mothership.

Only 50% of an insurance corporate venturing unit’s invested companies today will be their best corporate investments next year in view of internal and external changes.

A more formal insurtech investment ecosystem will arise with greater concentration in a smaller number of hubs (Silicon Valley, New York, London, Singapore) that foster innovative environments. If you are not “present” locally, as a service provider, you will not be in the game.

Speed will be as, if not more important a factor than the quality of the capital, for entrepreneurs in the best insurtech opportunities. Bad news, for insurance corporate venturing unitss with long decision-chains or timelines.

Insurance corporate venturing units that create a powerful gravity to their brand will triumph over those who are largely reliant on opportunistic investment ideas landing in their “inbox”. Heightened importance of peer referrals, networking, publishing, speaking, writing and so forth.

With increasing numbers of people in the insurtech ecosystem, there will be a filtering out of people (entrepreneurs, investors and others) who are truly centres of expertise and objects of interest. Having your CEO make blow-hard statements about his visit to Google, facilitating an insurance disruption event or thinking that merely pushing out generic position papers on your own or a third party’s platform will get you there, is a fool’s paradise.

Tech entrepreneurs that live at 35,000 feet and are beholden to the future without regards to the health of today’s insurance industry, today’s realities of marketing an early stage business and today’s decision-making are living in cloud cuckoo land.